Well, for me, it’s time to start making a slight return to the day job. I’m still on my maternity leave with son number 2 (now 11 weeks old) but I had my first ‘keep in touch’ day in the office yesterday.

I feel far more ‘in touch’ this time round than I did on my first maternity leave in 2007 and that is mostly because I’m still dipping into the digital stream. I’m still up to date with what peers are doing across local government and am inspired on a number of tasks for when I get back fully. It was however, lovely to be in the office, catch up with my team and work on something practical rather than just look in from the outside.

I’m also still chipping away at the MA dissertation. A very rough first draft of some big chapters have been thrown together and I’m doing some warm up stretches before diving into the main body – creation of a draft web content strategy, pulling together results of an audit of sample content and applying all the theory stuff to these bits. I’m on the edge (in more ways than one).

But one academic project can’t be enough, can it? Apparently I think not so I’m also blogging away somewhere secret as research for a co-authored paper on fan-to-fan communication in the pre-, emerging- and post-digital age. A way for me to bring together my loves of communication, learning and Take That. That box of dog eared posters, ticket stubs and letters from the 90s? That’s no longer just a box of stuff, it’s research!

And finally, I’m ramping up my music writing. I’m, as always, available on a freelance basis.

So, what’s going on? The usual chaotic mess of stuff…just how I love it 🙂